So Many Balls in the Air: Mike Mollett at MorYork

 

Mike Mollett took the world and made it into a ball…and tossed it into the giddy air of art.  Offering works spanning from 2014 to 2019, Mollett’s recent exhibition at MorYork offered many spheres of viewing pleasure.

Featuring both sculptures and archival digital prints from an on-going series, Mollett’s work at MorYork – and throughout his artistic practice – utilizes found materials either collected or donated. Many materials are locally compiled, or as the artist puts it, if his work was wine, it would feature the region’s “terroir.”

 

While many works are spherical, some, like a pyramid stack of mesh cubes, bring in additional shapes. Always, Mollett creates highly tactile, dimensional works that seem as if they held a universe filled with kinetic energy within their confines.

“Each piece is a collection of generally common materials. They are grounded in our times, speaking possibly of what was, what is, and what could be next,” Mollett, who is a poet and performer (Mud People) as well as visual artist, explains.

He keeps his hand-made works green, rarely using paints, solvents, or power tools. He relies on “accident and discovery” to compile his images; and is inspired to create from the nature of the materials he works with, whether lint balls, wire, or wads of grass. He twists wires to form sensual shapes, lightly contains and binds materials, and always keeps a playful aspect to his work.

According to the artist, his works are both unpretentious and somewhat transitory, “easily crushed by almost anything… in this world of durable transience.” His use of “gathered stuff” is something like shaping a nest, he relates, driven in part by the all too-intractable fact that it’s difficult to financially support an artist’s life. There is no marble or bronze used in these almost ephermeral, light of heart as well as material, works.

 

 

 

“These small things are delicate,” he relates, but he refuses to keep them in a plexiglass box or glass case. Instead, he relishes the facts that much of his work is as delicate as a finely made bird’s nest “in a windstorm… it’s up to the weather to save them or blow them away.”

It is also up to the viewer to preserve them, their delicate beauty, their recyclable nature. Infused with a strong sense of motion, used in performance or hung like planetary tumbleweeds from the ceiling, these captivating works seem as if they are about to not just blow away in a metaphorical storm, but to transform themselves. Perhaps they will transform into something more permanent, fanciful imagination having taken root.

In times as heavy as these, creating something this drenched in lightness is not easy; his works are subtle but ecstatic, supple and mysterious.

If you missed his exhibition at Highland Park’s MorYork, keep on the look out for another. As a part of LA’s vast art scene, Mollett’s work is always worth seeking out – eccentric, profound, magical, and of the moment.

He puts these balls into the air and lets them hover there, levitating the spirit.

• Genie Davis; photos courtesy of the artist: reading at MorYork – Jeff Rogers. LA MUDPEOPLE MorYork – Elise Rodriguez.  Ball art – Weldon Brewster